Tuesday, November 4, 2008

ALEC - the six hat dance

Six hat thinking is a decision making technique developed by Edward De Bono. It forces us to change our habitual ways of thinking – to think outside the square! By donning the six hats it gives more scope to our thoughts in a structured and cohesive manner. When all six hats have been on your head you can safely say all options have been exhausted and your conclusion will be rock solid.

Yesterday I was given the task of putting together a folio of my work in Craig’s class. At first I thought, ‘Oh no, this is going to be huge!’

But it soon dawned on me that if I utilise the six hats my chances of success will surely improve.

White hat – I looked through all my previous work as well as magazines and catalogues to select what I liked and disliked. The information/data has been gathered.

Green hat – Wild ideas of wacky layouts, slightly legible fonts and vast expanses of negative space ran through my mind but to choose any I would have to welcome the next hat.

Red hat – Intuition takes over and I settle on 3 different over all ‘themes’ for my folio that I think people would like and meet some sort of industry standard.

Black hat – Now it is time to sift through my work and 3 themes with a fine tooth comb and eliminate anything and everything that I don’t like or wouldn’t sit well in a magazine. Once this is out of the way it is time for…

Yellow hat – Now that the elimination stage is over I can look at all the positives of my work and start to build a rock solid portfolio.